“Place the oxygen mask on yourself first before helping small children or others who may need your assistance.”

You cannot take care of others if you do not take care of yourself. This is something that I have heard since I started my career in education. I get the point of it and I think I do a somewhat ok job of it. But my sister really embodied this motto when she took a 90-day sabbatical from her job as a reverend for a mainly homeless community, to hike the Appalachian trail. She told me that she met a lot of great people on the trail but actively worked to hike totally solo. She said that she spends most of her life working for others and she wanted to do this one thing on her own, and reach her distance and speed goal. Although I do not work in education anymore, I do find that I often put others’ feelings ahead of my own and have started to realize that I don’t need to do that to be successful, happy and have strong relationships. People want to be around people that can support them and how can you support someone else if you can’t support yourself. I hope to emulate this part of my sister.